ARRL Sweepstakes Contest, CW
Call: W6UE
Operator(s): KA6SAR, N6AN, W4EF
Station: W6UE
Class: Multi-Op HP
QTH: LAX
Operating Time (hrs): 23:30
Radios: SO2R
Summary:
Band QSOs
------------
160: 0
80: 76
40: 239
20: 341
15: 377
10: 245
------------
Total: 1278 Sections = 80 Total Score = 203,680
Club: Southern California Contest Club
Comments:
After a two-year hiatus from any kind of serious CW SS effort, I decided at the
last minute that I would try putting a multi-operator effort together at W6UE.
Aside from a flaky monitor circuit in the club?s TS-950SDX and a dead packet
TNC, everything at the station was working for a change and I had just installed
a third PC at the club which would provide us with a telnet connection to the
packet cluster in place of our broken over-the-air packet setup. All in all it
seemed like a good time to give it a go. On the Monday before the contest, I put
out a call to the usual suspects to see if anyone was available. Mike, KA6SAR
fresh from 20-meter duty at NQ4I in the CQ Worldwide Phone contest replied that
he was going to be in town and was interested in doing something. David,
N6AN/XE1NTT who was just back from 6D9X also expressed interest, but said he
would only have limited availability due to family commitments. With David and
Mike?s uncertain schedules, it wasn?t clear that we would have 2 operators
present at all times. I had spent quite a bit of time upgrading the station so
it could be rapidly reconfigured from a two operating position multi-single
configuration into an SO2R configuration, so I figured I could run SO2R to pick
up the slack during those times when we didn?t have a second operator around.
The weekend before during CQ Worldwide Phone, I had installed DXtelnet on our
spare PC and test driven the Trlog multiport network on our two operating
positions, so it looked like we had the logging hardware/software handled. On
the Thursday before the contest, I made a late afternoon run to Radio Shack and
cleaned them out of audio adapters and Y-cables which we were running low on
(its amazing how a contest station can suck up seemingly hundred of dollars
worth of audio cables and adapters). My plan was to get everything setup that
night, so that I could sleep in on Saturday morning thereby avoiding the usual
11th hour pre-contest frenzied panic. ?Best laid plans of mice and men? - by 3
am on Friday I was still screwing around with the computers (I had become
obsessed with trying to get K6STI?s ?FONT? to run on an uncooperative IBM
Aptiva) and my head was starting to bob, so I made the command decision to take
Friday off of work, so I could get things right. Friday morning I made the
second of what was to ultimately be 4 pre-contest trips to Radio Shack so that I
could pick-up even more audio adapters and exchange a 3 speaker selector switch
for a 3 audio source selector (which is what I thought I had purchased the first
time around). I arrived at the station later that afternoon and started wiring.
The plan was to setup an audio switcher so that the multiplier station op could,
with the push of a button, listen either to his radio, the run station radio, or
both radios simultaneously. It was my hope that this scheme would help improve
coordination between the S&P operator and the run operator. It worked really
well and with the club?s Heil headsets, there didn?t appear to be any change in
run operator?s RX audio level as I had feared there would be when the mult
station operator switched his headphones to listen in on the run radio.
The next challenge was coming up with a lockout switch so that we wouldn?t be
transmitting on two bands simultaneously. In years past we had used a big DPDT
toggle switch in a small p-box that was velcro?d to the operating console right
between the run station and the mult station. This box went in series with the
CW key lines from each of the two stations, and would only allow one radio?s key
line be activated at any given instant. Unfortunately, I couldn?t find it. I
was, however, able to find N6VI?s phone SS lockout box, but it wasn?t clear to
me that I could make it work for CW as it used big clunky relays and was setup
to latch PTT closures from a pair of foot switches rather than opening and
closing key lines. Then it occurred to me that I could use the PTT outputs from
our TRlog interfaces to drive the foot switch inputs on Marty?s box. This would
actually be a step up from the big toggle switch, as it wouldn?t require us to
be constantly flipping the switch when ?stealing? PTT control from the other
operating position. I got it wired into the station in a matter of minutes. At
first it looked like a slam-dunk until I tried sending CW on our TS-870. The PTT
would close, but no CW. When I disconnected the lockout input from the W1WEF
TRLog interface and tried using VOX, I got perfect CW. ?Rats!? - the big relays
in the lockout box were sinking too much current to the PTT output of the Trlog
parallel port interface. I looked around the shack and found some circa 30 year
old PNP transistors that we got from the KD6W estate. The little bin they were
in was labelled ?beta = 25?, which seemed a bit on the low side to me. It was
getting late and coming up on closing time for the local Radio Shacks, so rather
than mess with these old transistors which might not have enough gain to do the
job effectively (I wasn?t even sure my driver circuit would work with high-gain
transistors), I decided I would run to Radio Shack and buy some 2N2907?s or
2N3906?s. Since we don?t have the greatest tools at W6UE, I also decided to take
the lockout box home where I would have a decent workshop to complete the
modifications. I would stop by Radio Shack on my way home, fix the box, and
then return to the shack to test it out. I stopped by the Radio Shack in
Pasadena, cleaned them out of PNP switching transistors and then headed home.
About half-way home, I started worrying again that my driver circuit wouldn?t
work, and that I would be stuck hunting for parts and/or troubleshooting on the
Saturday morning before the contest, so I stopped at a second Radio Shack close
to my house and picked up their last pair of reed relays as a back-up. When I
got home, I finished tracing out the Marty?s circuit just to be sure it really
did work the way I thought it did. At this point, it was coming up on 8:00 PM
local, so I decided I would take a break from the technical chores and make some
QSOs in the Friday night NCCC practice SS. It was too late to setup any logging
software, so I grabbed a piece of notebook paper and started writing down
sequential serial numbers. Within minutes the action had started. My home
station pretty much sucks, so I decided to start on 80 meters which is the only
band where I actually have a decent antenna (full size inverted-vee at 40 ft).
Thirty minutes later (and after a trip to 40 meters) I had bagged 27 QSOs, which
by the way were recorded on one of the messiest paper logs in contesting
history. ?Okay that was fun - I am still a lid, and I still can?t send by hand
worth a damn.? I finished up the lockout modifications and then checked out the
relay action ? ?okay good only about 0.4mA of sink current to close the 70mA
relay.? ?That implies a beta of around 170 ? cool ? that should make the
parallel port interface happy?. It was now time to head back to Pasadena to see
if it would actually key the radios.
When I arrived back at W6UE, Mike KA6SAR was there, so I set him to work
checking out TRlog to make sure our logcfg.dat files were set up with the proper
exchange, CQ memories, etc. I quickly re-installed the lockout box and sent a
string of dits with the TS-870. ?Cool, it?s keying the radio, but wait a minute,
the PTT is hanging, it won?t release. Aaargh!? ?Okay, I probably have too much
gain in the driver circuit (I should have used one of those old ?beta = 25?
transistors after all). Perhaps a series resistor?? I grabbed some RCA ?Y?
adapter cables and an 8.2 Kohm resistor from KD6W?s junkbox, and quickly rigged
up a series resistor between the PTT output of the W1WEF interface and the base
of the PNP driver transistor. ?Alas it works, time to solder.? Once we had the
CW interfaces working, Mike and I decided we should give the station a test
drive to make sure that there weren?t any unwanted inter-station interactions.
?Okay 20, 15, and 10 aren?t getting into each other. Uh oh, 40 meters is killing
20 with S9+10dB QRM. What?s going on here?? ?This has never been a problem
before, the antennas are on separate towers 200? apart, and we?ve got stubs and
bandpass filters.? After wiggling connectors and all manner of in-shack
troubleshooting, we determined that the problem had to be outside. It had been
raining all night, a welcomed event in fire-ravaged Southern California, so we
decided it must be some kind of moisture related problem and opt to leave it for
Saturday morning in hopes that it will fix itself. I head home.
On Saturday morning I arrive at the shack with my box of snacks in hand. Mike is
already there getting ready. We settled in and get ready for zero hour. The sun
is shining and there is now no trace of the interstation QRM we were seeing the
night before - our instincts had been right (thank God). Mike runs a few dummy
QSOs through the computer network which appears to be working fine. We flush the
dummy log and started tuning around the bands so that we can get a feel for
where to start. Fifteen sounds good with loud signals coming in from the Gulf
coast and the Midwest. Ten was also producing good signals, so we make the
decision that Mike would start there. When zero hour comes, we immediately
started having problems. Mike is having trouble with Trlog right off the bat.
Seems that the program was copying the contents of the exchange window into the
callsign window, and writing over the callsign. ?Not good!? After a few tense
moments that seem like an eternity, I convince Mike that the run-together
exchange looks like a callsign and that he needs to put spaces in it. It works,
but as soon as we cure that hiccup, the keyboard Mike is using starts going
nuts. When Mike would try to enter a call, a string of random characters would
appear in the callsign window that bore absolutely no resemblance to the
callsign he had just typed. I thought, ?oh crap, we?ve got RF in the keyboard,
but wait a minute, its doing it even when he is not transmitting?. ?This is
weird. Okay maybe RF is putting the keyboard into some kind of weird alternate
character state.? I got down on the floor and tried wiggling the keyboard
connector. The problem seemed to come and go. Meanwhile, Mike had a small pileup
calling him. ?Hey wait a minute we are in DOS mode, we don?t need this mouse.? I
disconnected the mouse. ?Darn its still doing it.? ?Maybe it?s the keyboard.? I
grab the $8 Fry?s keyboard from the Telnet computer, set it down in front of
Mike and feed the cable down towards the CPU. While Trlog was sending a CQ, I
make the swap. ?Hmmm, that seems to have fixed the problem ? knock on wood?.
?Okay mental note, throw the offending IBM keyboard off the roof of Spalding Lab
next time I am up there.? After that, things seemed to settle down. Ten dries up
pretty quickly, so at 54 minutes in, I start up on 15 CW. What a rate fest!
Prior to this I think my best rate in SS CW was something like 70/hr. The rate
meter is up over 120/hr at times. We finish hour two with 111 more QSOs in the
log including a bunch of juicy mults that Mike picks off on the second rig while
I am running. Things start to look up. The next few hours are more of the same.
Rates are good and the mults keep coming. At 0338Z Mike puts VY1JA in the log
for #79. Eighteen minutes later, N0KR in North Dakota answers my CQ on 40 CW.
It?s 06:56 into the contest and we have our sweep ? cool! Things start to slow
down now. Mike hits 80CW while I continue to mine 40 meters for QSOs. Around
07:15Z, David N6AN shows up to relieve us, but he looks like a zombie. Seems
that he has spent the whole day trying to keep up with his son, Alan who
apparently has more energy than all three of us contesters put together. Mike
has a long drive back to Orange County ahead of him and needed to get going, so
I decide to hang around and help David. David takes over for Mike on 80 CW and I
continued to slog it out on 40. Around 08:30Z it becomes very clear that our
Saturday night run is about out of gas. David and I shut down the station at
8:43Z and head home with 817 QSOs in the log and a sweep. We have a decent QSO
number, but we are still 80 to 100 QSO behind a handful of leading scorers. As
local radio personality, Mr. KABC says, ?Better than most, not as good as some?.
I had planned to arrive back at W6UE on Sunday morning around 13:30Z, so I could
take advantage of the Sunday morning pre-Church rate spurt. Unfortunately, I
overslept. Apparently in a semi-conscious state, I managed to turn off my alarm.
When my feet finally hit the floor at my home in Tujunga at 14:40Z, we only have
3 minutes of off-time left. It was hopeless at this point, W6UE is 16 miles from
my home in Tujunga (plus the 200 yards or so of walking distance from the
parking lot to the shack), so any form of transportation short of a Star Trek
transporter, meant we weren't going realize a full 24 hours of operating time. I
decide to suck it up and make the best of it. The cold start I gave my truck
probably shortened the life of the engine by 10,000 miles, but at 15:12Z, I was
sitting in the operating chair at W6UE calling CQ. Since Mike, KA6SAR wouldn?t
be back until around 10:00 AM local, I decided to run in SO2R mode until he
arrived. Everything seemed to be going fine until around 17:15 UTC when I was
poised to work W8RC on 10 meters. As I called him, he kept sending question
marks and his signal faded to nothing. As I tuned around 10 meters, I got a
sinking feeling that was quickly confirmed by the cynical messages reading ?time
to watch football? that came streaming across the DX cluster shortly after all
the signals went away. ?Rats? - I had already used all of our off time plus the
30 minutes of prime operating time that I had squandered on the 210 Freeway
earlier that morning. After a quick stretch I got back in the chair and started
hitting the F1 key again. The next 30 minutes netted 3 QSOs, but then things
quickly recovered. We ended up with a 32 hour, which wasn?t bad at all
considering that the band was only open for about 30 of those 60 minutes. Mike
showed up a little bit later and we reconfigured the station for multi-operator
operation and hunkered down for the Sunday slog. Rates were surprisingly good,
and we had fun in between CQs knocking off the ?fresh meat? clusters spots as
they showed up on the Trlog bandmap from time-to-time. About 3 PM we discovered
another minor computer problem had developed when Mike noticed that the logging
computer attached to the TS-870 was no longer identifying dupes. Seems that
every packet spot on the bandmap was showing up as ?fresh meat?. After mumbling
something about using CT instead of Trlog, he resigned himself to finishing out
the contest using the alt-L function in Trlog to manually search for dupes.
?Another item for the punch list?. We finished up the contest alternating CQ?s
between 40 and 20 CW.
Although we didn?t set the world on fire with our score, Mike and I did have a
good time running rate on Saturday afternoon and choreographing the two-station
S&P dance on Sunday. And aside from a few computer hiccups, which were probably
due to my inability to master MS-DOS, the station hardware held up admirably
well. Thanks and congratulations to K0RF, N6VR, K6AM, and K5TA for showing us
how it is done (especially K5TA who managed to do such a fantastic job which
such meager hardware). And thanks to a very tired N6AN for dragging himself to
the shack on Saturday evening to help with the graveyard shift.
Cu all next time.
73 de Mike, W4EF??????????
******************************************************************************
Rig(s):
Station#1 - TS950SDX/Alpha 78
Station#2 (SO2R radio) - TS940S/SB-221
Station#3 (mult station) - TS870/Henry 2K-D
Trlog 6.78/DX Telnet
Antenna(s):
80 meters: Inverted-Vee at 90'
160 meter dipole at 90' (for receive)
40 meters: KLM 4 element Yagi at 102'
20 meters: 5 element monoband Yagi at 70'
15 meters: 5 element monoband Yagi at 80'
10 meters: 5 element monoband Yagi at 90'
10/15/20 meters: KT34XA at 114'
2003 SS CW Rate Report - W6UE
HOUR 80CW 40CW 20CW 15CW 10CW TOTAL ACCUM
---- ------ ------ ------ ------ ------ ----- -----
21 0 0 0 11 75 86 86
22 0 0 4 102 5 111 197
23 0 0 4 89 3 96 293
0 0 0 73 20 0 93 386
1 0 0 72 6 0 78 464
2 0 2 66 1 0 69 533
3 0 38 23 0 0 61 594
4 26 39 0 0 0 65 659
5 14 45 0 0 0 59 718
6 14 32 0 0 0 46 764
7 14 21 0 0 0 35 799
8 8 10 0 0 0 18 817
9 0 0 0 0 0 0 817
10 0 0 0 0 0 0 817
11 0 0 0 0 0 0 817
12 0 0 0 0 0 0 817
13 0 0 0 0 0 0 817
14 0 0 0 0 0 0 817
15 0 2 31 3 0 36 853
16 0 0 13 38 0 51 904
17 0 0 1 16 15 32 936
18 0 0 0 4 31 35 971
19 0 0 3 14 22 39 1010
20 0 0 2 7 41 50 1060
21 0 0 4 6 30 40 1100
22 0 0 3 19 18 40 1140
23 0 0 7 22 5 34 1174
0 0 6 11 19 0 36 1210
1 0 25 10 0 0 35 1245
2 0 19 14 0 0 33 1278
TOTAL 76 239 341 377 245
2003 CW SS QSO DISTRIBUTION REPORT - W6UE
1. Il 81
2. Scv 52
3. Mn 46
4. Mi 45
5. Oh 42
6. Ep 40
7. Va 39
8. Wi 38
9. STx 36
10. Mdc 35
11. Co 33
12. NTx 31
13. Em 30
14. WWa 29
15. Nc 25
16. In 25
17. Tn 24
18. Sv 22
19. Ct 21
20. Ga 20
21. Or 20
22. NNj 20
23. ENy 20
24. Eb 20
25. Mo 19
26. Ks 19
27. WNy 18
28. Nh 18
29. On 18
30. WPa 16
31. Ky 15
32. Ia 15
33. Ar 14
34. Al 14
35. Sf 14
36. NLi 13
37. Lax 13
38. Nm 13
39. WcF 12
40. Org 12
41. NFl 11
42. Ok 11
43. La 11
44. SFl 10
45. Sjv 10
46. Id 9
47. Bc 9
48. SNj 9
49. Ms 8
50. Nv 8
51. Az 8
52. Vt 8
53. Wv 7
54. Ab 7
55. Sb 7
56. Sdg 7
57. Sk 6
58. NNy 6
59. Sc 6
60. Wy 6
61. Ri 6
62. WMa 6
63. Ut 6
64. Ew 6
65. Me 5
66. Sd 5
67. Nd 5
68. Ne 4
69. Qc 4
70. De 4
71. Ak 4
72. Vi 3
73. Mt 3
74. Mar 3
75. WTx 3
76. Mb 3
77. Nl 3
78. Pr 2
79. Pac 1
80. Nt 1
Posted using 3830 Score Submittal Forms at: http://www.hornucopia.com/3830score/
---------------------------------------------------------------
The world's top contesters battle it out in Finland!
THE OFFICIAL FILM of WRTC 2002 now on professional DVD and VHS!
http://home1.pacific.net.sg/~jamesb/
---------------------------------------------------------------
_______________________________________________
3830 mailing list
3830@contesting.com
http://lists.contesting.com/mailman/listinfo/3830
|